It was a long journey to Kojur. Lindír had not taken this path before, but he had seen enough maps of the North to know that it was a simple matter of keeping the ocean on his right, skipping over the straits of Gargan and Meilthatr, and flying onward until the island of Kojur loomed to the south. For seven days, Lindír drew ever closer to the land of his birth, stopping only to eat, to drink, and to sleep. For seven days, Lindír wondered if there had been another option.
His nightmares returned in full force, nightmares of entrapment and slaughter that made him wish to scream and beg for respite. When he was awake, Lindír swung madly between foresight and regret, one moment formulating a plan for how he would defeat his mother’s minions, the next wishing that he could have treated Biorra better than he had. No matter what his thoughts, no matter how awful the nightmares, he flew onward. To turn back would be to damn himself to an eternal restless anxiety, to never again feel peace or certainty no matter the circumstance. Not to mention that turning back would be to damn himself as an oathbreaker, once and for all time.
The first shower of arrows came upon him as an unexpected homecoming. There was something right about raiding, about swooping down upon the castles and towns of human civilization with a burst of fire and a terrible roar, something that felt natural in Lindír’s bones. This would be his final warpath, that he knew, so best to remind the little folk of who he was.
Lindír’s week-long odyssey was met with only brief skirmishes, paltry displays of force rather than true utilizations of it. This was not the rampage he had made across Gulliheim a few years earlier. Only one target drew his true ire: the Red Citadel. So Lindír saved the white-hot simmering violence in his guts for that castle and that castle alone.
Matters began to change once Lindír crossed over to Kojur itself. The awareness that this was the closest he had ever come to the Red Citadel since his escape grew ever stronger, like a needle being driven slowly into the center of his chest. The temperate forests of Kojur were like no others in the North, and so as Lindír flew over their dark canopies he could remember only the desperation of his first flight, the blood-pounding fear of recapture that had saturated his escape. Lindír’s dread and hatred of his family rose to a fever pitch until he could hardly think or feel anything else.
He knew that either fear would take him, driving him to turn aside, or else rage would; in the end, it was loyalty to his oath that swayed him. As evening fell and the dim outline of the Red Citadel came into view, Lindír gave himself over to rage. He roared and howled, sprayed flame across the twilight, filled his mind with cloudy visions of the fear he was sure that Guthrún and Ásgeir would be feeling at his approach. And when at last he came close enough that he was sure that the castle’s defenders would be able to hear, Lindír Guthrúndottir roared his challenge.
“To your spears, knights! To your bows and your mail! Take all your trinkets of steel and believe that they will safeguard you, for tonight, your prince returns home!”
The arrows began not long after, light showers of them arcing through the cold air to deflect uselessly off of Lindír’s scales. He did not even feel the need to dodge them. When a great stone came hurtling through the air in his direction, Lindír’s tone changed.
That engine of war, the manjaniq, twin to the one that Lindír had destroyed outside of Stokvöllur, was the first sign that the Red Citadel was ready for his arrival. It would not be the last. The storm of arrows grew thicker, until by sheer luck some of them began to embed themselves in the soft skin of the flaw in his chest. Lindír cried out, less in pain than in rage and spite. He weaved through the last few moments of the approach, swaying serpentine from side to side until he was at last close enough for his flames to vomit forth upon the walls of the Red Citadel in a deadly wave.
It was a hard battle, but not a long one. The walls of the Red Citadel were ringed with archers who turned the air above the castle into a hailstorm of death. Lindír flew faster than he thought he could, swerving and diving, and still he bled in hot streams onto the grass below. Although they were skilled with the bow, those guards were but men, and with only padded jackets to defend them, they died in scores. The manjaniq was caught in Lindír’s claws, its splinters scattered across the innermost courtyard.
“The Queen! My brother! Where are they?” roared Lindír. “Come out already, come out or I will tear apart the bricks of this castle down to the foundation!”
Lindír circled, eyes narrowed to peer through the growing dark. The wooden portions of the castle burned, and none dared brave the uncovered areas to extinguish them. Lindír’s anger built steadily, until he was almost ready to make good on his promise, wondering how the stones of the castle would fare against him at his full strength. But then, from out of the huge gate of the innermost keep, two figures emerged.
The first figure had not changed in many years. Queen Guthrún the Maimed, Queen of Hvalheim, stood bony and weak, a brass-plated cane held in one hand while she derived the strength to walk from leaning upon her companion’s arm. Her hair, though braided well and lined with gold bands and pins, was still a sickly off-grey, and hung shroudlike around her shoulders. Her vestments were not those of a queen, resembling more those of a butcher, an undecorated woolen smock hanging over her chest, her ankle-length dress without even a hint of embroidery or color.
The second figure, though, was the one who drew Lindír’s attention far more. His last memories of Ásgeir, his brother, had been of a youth still in the throes of adolescence, gangly and awkward. No longer. Ásgeir was slender man, not barrel-chested like his father, but enormously tall, with broad shoulders and narrow waist, masculine power visible in the cords of his forearms and brilliant red hair that fell to the mid-back in a single enormous braid. The wooden mask that had covered Ásgeir’s face had been replaced with one of gold or brass, but although the face on the mask was still that of a bearded warrior, the face underneath held no beard. He was also dressed for war, with a sword at his side and a coat of mail on his chest, a display so pathetically useless against a dragon that it almost made Lindír laugh aloud.
For a moment, Lindír considered loosing his flames from on high, burning them both and letting it be done with. But that would hardly satisfy; and besides, his wings were tired, and they could no more harm him on the ground than they could in the air. Lindír slowed, circled around, and finally let his claws touch the soil of his homeland once more.
“Mother. Brother. Have you any last words? Will you defend yourselves in the final hour, or will you submit yourselves to death?”
“Defend ourselves?” said Guthrún. “From what charge?”
“You locked me in a dungeon for half my life!” Lindír roared. “You forced me to obey by promising scraps of freedom, and half the time you withheld even those! I can hardly sleep without remembering what you did to me! I swore to serve the Countess of Stokvöllur, and the moment I turned my back to search for peace, still you plunged a spear into it!”
Guthrún grinned awfully, baring a dozen missing teeth. “And look at all the good you have done with the freedom that we so cruelly withheld from you.”
Lindír whipped his tail against the earth, rearing up haughtily. “You brought this upon yourself. If you had been able to restrain your greed, if you had not laid waste to Stokvöllur, I would be far away from here.”
“I did only what any prince would have done,” Ásgeir said, standing even taller than before. “There was no malice to it. We needed control of the Tinker Hills, and Stokvöllur stood in our way.”
Lindír’s jaw fell open with a hiss of disbelief and a shower of sparks. “You really are defending yourself. Here, now, in the hour of your death, you give me no apologies but only… justifications.”
Ásgeir folded his arms across his chest. “This will not be the hour of our deaths.”
Lindír laughed. He lowered himself down, bending his neck to the earth until his eyes were barely higher than those of his human brother, and slunk forward with his chest close to the ground. “Your guards are all dead, Prince of Hvalheim, and you stand with a dragon before you. As soon as I have finished toying with you, I shall kill you.”
“You will not. You will join me, fight at my side, for the glory of Hvalheim. As second son, it is your birthright.”
It did not occur to Lindír, not even for an instant, to correct Ásgeir on the matter of his sex. She may have been a wife to Biorra, but Lindír and Ásgeir were brothers. What gave him pause, instead, was the cold certitude in Ásgeir’s voice. He whirled around, looking for the jaws of the trap, listening and sniffing for the army that Ásgeir seemed to think he had waiting in the wings. There was none; indeed, though it could not have been the case, it seemed as if the three of them were the only thinking creatures in the castle.
“Do not speak to me of my birthright,” Lindír said, quiet and deep. “My birthright was a curse of monstrosity, a convulsion of fate sealing me in a dragon’s skin. You have no ground to stand on.”
“Your arrival was quite unexpected,” Guthrún said. She recollected herself, drawing the strength from her favorite son to stand just a little higher. “We had less than an hour to decide the course. You know nothing, my child; but we shall educate you. Ásgeir, remove your mask.”
He nodded solemnly, removing his arm from her grip. While Guthrún the Maimed fell upon the support of her cane, he reached up behind his ears and undid the lacings, letting the golden mask fall to the floor with a soft thud.
Ásgeir’s face shined in the firelight. It appeared at first as though he wore a second mask under the first, but at so close a range Lindír could tell that this second mask was a part of his skin. Across his brow, around the sockets of his eyes, extending in uneven stripes across his cheek and jaw, Ásgeir bore a layer of fine scales. Even his mouth had no lips, only scales; and within that mouth was an eclectic mix of human teeth and needle-sharp dragon’s fangs. The scales were the exact same color as Lindír’s.
“We are, both of us, dragons,” Ásgeir said. “The same fire flows through us.”
“What?” Lindír said. “The onion…”
“Is a story for children, given to you when you were a child,” said Guthrún. “I sought the immortality of dragons, the purity of sulfur, for my children. And such was the result.”
“If this was your intention, why lock me away for my whole life?”
“This,” the Queen gestured at Lindír, “was not my intention. I sought the strength of dragons in human flesh. You were an unexpected consequence, an error. Even in my most lucid moments I was unsure if you would prove to be an asset or a threat. And when you maimed our Castellan…”
“Don’t you dare blame this on me! This is not my fault! None of this was my fault!” The hot, tight cramp of flame burgeoned in Lindír’s chest, ready to set his rage upon them.
Ásgeir stepped forward. “That is the past. Razan told me of your actions in the first siege of Stokvöllur, of the might and cunning you demonstrated there. Rejoin your family, and all can be forgiven.”
“No!” Lindír screamed, a scream of pain that rent the forest. “Don’t you dare mention her name in front of me! Die, you bastard, die!”
Fire billowed up Lindír’s throat. A moment before they were obscured by the golden cloud, Guthrún held up her hand; then all was flame. Lindír cooked the earth of the inner courtyard into ceramic, sent jets of flame shooting up the walls of the inner keep. He did not move, nor even for a moment turn away the billowing jet of flame from where his mother and brother had last stood. They would burn, burn to ash, burn to smoke, burn to nothing before his endless rage. Dragons cannot cry, but if they could…
Lindír’s flame at last relented, fading into nothing. And before him, at the center of a perfect circle of un-wilted grass, stood Guthrún and Ásgeir, both unharmed. Ásgeir’s shoulders bunched in fury, and he thrust out his right arm to the side.
“Ha—!”
“No,” Guthrún interrupted. “Go back and complete the work as best you can. I shall buy you time.”
“Mother?”
“You know what I am capable of, my son. I will hold him back.”
Lindír stood, frozen in shock. Nothing short of another dragon had ever resisted his flame so, and Guthrún’s papery skin was not even flushed from heat. While Ásgeir dashed back through the gates of the castle, he faced off against the one who had birthed him. There was about a body-length between the two of them, and Lindír’s attention narrowed to her as he tensed his muscles for the oncoming duel.
Guthrún tottered forward, cane barely able to support her weight. “Your birth ruined me, you know. Sickness took hold where your passage split my flesh, ravaging organs and sinews alike. Before you I was Guthrún the Pyromancer; now I am but Guthrún the Maimed.”
“Fire magic will have no effect on me,” Lindír said. “You should know that.”
“Fire! Pyromancy is much more than fire. Salt, quicksilver, and sulfur, those are the elements which make up the universe; and of them, sulfur is the greatest. Sulfur is the stuff of the soul, the motive force which drives all other processes.”
Guthrún grew in strength with each step. Her back became less bent, her stride became less reliant on her cane for support. In the veins and arteries of her body, visible through her skin, there came a faint golden glow, coursing through her flesh with each beat of her labored heart.
“Sulfur is the immortal element, that which is beyond the base faculties of body or mind. Before you ruined me, I was the greatest master of sulfur in all the North, if not the world. Though I have faint little of my mastery remaining, child, I set my soul aflame for the future of my country.”
She threw aside the cane and walked under her own power. Steam rose faintly from her skin, and more golden flame lit the inside of her mouth, the backs of her eyes. Guthrún the Pyromancer threw her arms wide and tossed her head back to the sky.
“Now burn, you accursed thing!”
Guthrún burst into flames. A moment later, the entire courtyard was doused in flames brighter than the noonday sun.
